Passing Notes
by Silberias
Summary: It was a little thing, a note of no consequence other than what was written in a painfully controlled script. I love you.
1. Chapter 1

_I love you_

All that was written on the tiny and crumpled-folded-smoothed-crumpled-folded note were three words. The simple and abused little note had been on her desk, in the exact center. Sakura's hands shook as the probable April Fool's joke jabbed a little at her ribs. Yet she still felt flattered. Even if it was a joke, at least it wasn't signed to give her false leads or hope—and it would have her looking out for anonymous affection with a careful eye.

She also wasn't too worried if it was a joke—they might play their prank on her, but her response would be to send them flying (toothless) into Ame or Suna.

You didn't joke with Haruno Sakura about love and live, and, knowing this, she turned the mistreated paper over to write a return note on it. If the sender was a ninja—and would have to be to have this sort of clearance or ability to avoid clearance—then they would know she'd at least opened their note.

_You must be joking_.

* * *

If you saw this on my dA, please don't spoil the pairing.


	2. Chapter 2

_I can assure you that I am not._

The note was on a new piece of paper, crisply folded this time. The symbols were generic, showing no personal marking of them, no identifiable trademarks. This was turning out to be an elaborate joke!

Sakura carefully unfolded, read, and refolded the note throughout her day. It was a maddening experience, not knowing whether or not it was a fake or some real person with real feelings for her. Although she did not let on about her inner trials concerning the papered confession, Sakura did begin forming a mental list of who might have given it to her. Around midnight, after getting down with the last of her duties of rounds and paperwork, she also sat down at her desk and penned a response.

_Will you tell me who you are?_


	3. Chapter 3

_I will not give you my name, but I will tell you about myself, if you would do the same. Daffodils will be your answer if I can't answer any question._

The scrap of paper, nearly as tortured as the first, appeared on her desk several days later. The placement of it, cautious, beneath the side of the desk where her trashcan lurked was an obvious reference—_stop this now, or continue and face the consequences_. Sakura didn't have time to think about what she would say, she only had time to scribble one phrase before heading over to a meeting with the Hokage.

_Am I right in thinking that you know me and my schedule quite well?_


	4. Chapter 4

_Yes, I would think that you are right in that. Do you like having pink hair? I think it is beautiful._ The note looked as though it had been left hastily, not perfectly aligned with some line or theme of her desk.

And so it went.

The banter continued for months. In her mailbox, on her desk, in her backpack, in her mail, notes appeared and awaited answers. Sakura found that those notes asked nothing which she felt needed to be hidden—but her own questions didn't seem to be as tactful. Often she got the simple answer of _daffodils _along with some new question.

Rarely did she get them during times when she would either have to account for their presence or be unable to read them at her leisure. Her responses were always left in one of a few nooks in her desk that notes had appeared in before. Sakura took to keeping the original notes, love letters sometimes, and writing her own ones on her own paper.

Once during a meeting with Kakashi, now Hokage, and his staff she had nearly been caught reading one of the more poignant semi-letters. Kakashi had asked in his usual disinterested tone when the Sakura he had taught had started filling in for the Sakura that was the director of the hospital. She might have flushed deeply, but replied in her sweetest voice that in the center of every mature woman there was another woman who wouldn't let go of being in love—even briefly.


	5. Chapter 5

_I know we don't revisit this often, but I need you to know that I still love you. It's hard to know that, I get it. The anonymous truth is sometimes too abstract to even consider. But I cannot go through the rest of my life without you knowing this._

The words were alarming to Sakura, who immediately wrote a response.

_You sound as though I will stop replying to your notes and cut you out of my life._

There was no reply for three days, and on the third day Sakura wrote a note at home to leave on her desk at work. It said, verbatim, what her admirer had said about the anonymous truth.

It was a semi-miracle that she found her admirer's note first before she deposited hers.

_One day, I will slip-up with this. On that day, I will find out if abstract made real will affect this—will affect you, me, everyone around us. Because I am human I cannot go my entire life without making mistakes, and this has become so elaborate that I fear every day that you shall catch me as I leave the newest reply. And then you will kill me or some other equally horrific thing._

Sakura quietly destroyed, in a fashion that Kakashi had taught her years before, the slightly mean note she'd written.


	6. Chapter 6

When, another few months later, Sakura finally wrote in her reply the three words she'd first received in April, there was a dry-spell of replies yet again. Dry-spells seemed only to happen when she surprised her correspondent, which Sakura found perfectly reasonable. It wasn't as though, with this relationship, one could simply lay a kiss upon a forehead or a hand upon another.

_You aren't joking, are you? I don't want to believe that you would be that cruel to me or any other man._

Sakura grinned when she didn't get a snarky reply from her loving pen-pal.

_Well, now I know which half of the population to rule out._


	7. Chapter 7

The meeting was running long, and Sakura was antsy to get back to her desk in the hospital. It was usually during—she had come to believe—the long meetings with Kakashi and the rest of his staff that her admirer left her letters and notes.

She could control herself, however, because the meeting was a serious one determining the establishments of new bloodline families in Konoha. It was a move which according to Kakashi, as well as Hyuuga Neji, might spark tension between Konohagakure and other hidden villages. Sakura was there to provide insight on medical possibilities of such bloodlines, and as a sounding board for any names which were generated from the meeting.

Boring. As. Hell.

Even Kakashi was doodling, she could see as he sat far from her across the table.

"Kakashi-sama—" Neji continued on with his drone, only to be interrupted.

"Kakashi." The correction was quick and decisive.

"Kakashi-sama," the younger man restarted without pause, "your lightning summons and strikes were taught to you by your father—and you were only able to pass them on to those who have incredible chakra levels are their disposal, correct?" Who would have known that Neji would make such a good bureaucrat, papers, graphs, personal biographies and all.

Sakura—and everyone else in the room—immediately knew where Neji was going with this. The people in the room watched Kakashi anxiously as his hand, the one not attached to the elbow supporting his chin, rose and roughly pulled through his wild mane of hair.

"Daffodils."


	8. Chapter 8

Sakura had long expected one of her male compatriots to slip-up. She expected the slight widening of the eyes (eye) and microsecond pause after said slip-up—as her correspondent had said he would—but she had never really considered it to be Kakashi. Kakashi seemed far too well put together, compartmentalized, and emotionally ruined by grief to ever fall in love. Did he have the capability to correspond with someone anonymously for more than eight months when he worked in the same office as they?

Of course he did—Sakura had just never considered him, really. He, for as long as she'd known him, kept his personal life (what little there was) personal and his professional life professional. It wasn't beyond comprehension that top-ranked ninja fell in love, it had just always seemed that Kakashi didn't have that in his destiny.

The meeting had progressed as usual, and Kakashi had done admirably as he finished conducting it. It was why he was Hokage in the first place, because he could hold back one side long enough for another to complete its tasks.

Sakura, however, had been distracted for the rest of the meeting—she had been quickly putting to paper every word that passed through her mind and as Kakashi called the meeting to its end she folded the paper quickly into the usual shape her correspondent—Kakashi—folded important confessions.

She didn't speak a word to him, there were too many people around, but she did give him a smile as she pressed the note into his steady hands. She couldn't, he couldn't, afford to freak out about this now.

_I don't think I could find a better man to be in love with._ It's still love…she thought. It's still love when you don't see a person for months, so it's love when you see the person for the first time. He had always seemed so centered, though—although as a medic Sakura knew that he needed someone to balance his life out properly, and that had always worried her about him as she watched him go through life—and his focus was still impeccable, despite everything.

He also had slipped up at the strangest times. Not that she worried over-much about that, she had finally gotten to attach a face to the man she was in love with—well, sort of. Not sort of in love with—but she still didn't know what Kakashi actually looked like.

She felt like a fool, he had seen every ploy of hers throughout the past few months. Kakashi knew when she'd asked him what he looked like that she was fishing for identifying marks and features…and he also knew that she knew of none that wouldn't immediately give him away. It was staring her right in the face…

She must **look** like a fool.

_Please don't let this be some joke because you're bored, please don't give up fighting for this. You fought so hard, you've told me, to even pick up the brush to write me those three words in the first place._

She had wanted so long for her pen-pal, whoever he was, to slip up right in front of her. She had wanted him to be a good enough ninja to not show everyone else that he'd messed up. She wanted him, now Kakashi, to be suddenly and completely hers--and have no one in the room know it at the time.

_But now I don't know what you want, because when I didn't know which face you were but who you were, and now I know which face you are and I don't know if I am to rely on who you are or who you might be…Because I know who you are, but not who you might be or become._

_What is it that you want?_


	9. Chapter 9

Not an hour later an aid informed her that the Hokage had requested a personal meeting with her. Sakura naturally asked why, testing the waters of this new development—of course Kakashi wouldn't put off dealing with something of this magnitude, it was against all sense of duty instilled in ninja who lived to his age—and Sakura received an answer which was so heartbreakingly reminiscent to her letters that she had to agree immediately. The Hokage wanted to speak with her for reasons concerning his own health.

Who better to speak to about the health of the reigning Hokage than the top med-nin of the village?

Who better to doctor, with comfort, an aching heart than one's love?

After a sharp rap of the aid upon the door to his main office, Sakura was left alone until there was a softly called, "_enter_," from within. Kakashi sat cross legged upon his desk, his thumb paused on the page of a book—a scrapbook of some sort.

Sakura entered the room and closed the door with a click—but after that didn't know how to stand. She'd never managed to be in love, really truly in love, before and so she didn't know how one stood in the room with one's significant other—and obviously she shouldn't stand at attention since…well, Kakashi's current seating arrangement precluded formality.

Kakashi, as she'd debated with herself, had turned the pages of his book towards the end of it. It was a scrapbook, filled with…Scraps. She didn't quite know what to make of that strange behavior…That was when Sakura's eyes followed Kakashi's other hand toward the desk surface, where he picked up what she recognized to be her newest letter to him. With utmost care the letter was pressed flat on the open page before him, and Kakashi gingerly secured it there.

The room was silent.

Sakura was about to draw breath to speak when Kakashi looked up at her. She was pinned by his gaze.

"This book, Sakura-chan, is full of professed love for me," he said softly, the mask bobbing to the words his lips formed, "but on the very first page, my own labored printing stares up at me every time I open it. I daily remind myself that what I was doing could be construed as one of the utmost wrongs—and that with a word this could easily be all I have to treasure." At each word that fell from him, and from, Sakura surmised, his heart, she felt her will to speak dry up in order to preserve the moment.

"However, you seem to have finally asked me something I have not found the answer for yet. What is it that I want? I might ask you the same question—although I fear the response to that, just as much as I fear pulling my mask down for you." _Look beneath the underneath_ Sakura reminded herself—he was giving her the answer right there if she could but find it..

"You want…" she paused for a moment to think, trying to avoid breaking eye-contact with him, trying to be brave enough to say for him that which he evidently wasn't brave enough to say himself... "You want…No, it's something I want…No…" his expression didn't change one iota, "_We_ both want to wake up in someone's arms from whom we have no secrets. Your mask represents your secrets, the things that have only ever gone on in your mind and what you've never told anyone. The notes, all these months, were your mask—because you don't know how to live without one, but you…must keep those secrets as they are." She ran out of thoughts to spill into the space between them, and another occurred to her just as Kakashi took a breath to agree or disagree.

"You can't carry on a relationship with someone who is content to see your face and to live with it when you wear your mask. You needed someone—me—to wear a mask and to protect it just as fiercely as you do your own. The most…fundamental part of who you are is the ability to bear those secrets. It was still a secret that you loved me—but it was bearable now that…" Sakura ran completely out of steam then…She couldn't look further, wasn't able to.

Kakashi filled in for her.

"It has been bearable because I knew my regard was well placed. That when I slipped up, as I knew I would eventually, you had already tested me to the brink of what I could share with you—I let you underneath my mask, so to speak." His hand rose, then, with fingertips touching—just barely—the edge of the cloth covering his face. His eye was steady.

But in a flash, Sakura was there, stopping any more downward progress. Kakashi still sat crosslegged on the desk, with Sakura leaning slightly over it—her hand firmly clenching his wrist.

"If I've been underneath it all this time, there is no need to remove it now. There will be plenty of times later when you can, but right now I don't need that as confirmation from you."


End file.
